Given his administration’s bizarre rhetorical struggles when it comes to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, the bar for Donald Trump’s speech on Tuesday at the Holocaust Memorial Museum was low. All he really had to do was show he understands that anti-Semitism is bad, and that the Holocaust happened mostly to Jews. He did that, and more. At times, his speech was genuinely moving. It was also disturbing in a very instructive way.

Latest from Politics

The Holocaust is both a defining event in the modern history of the Jewish people and a defining event in the modern history of inhumanity. It has profound particular significance to Jews and profound universal significance to anyone concerned with the marriage of war, bigotry, state power and human indifference. In the quarter century since the United States decided to memorialize the Holocaust with a museum on the National Mall, the presidents who have spoken about it have walked a line between these particular and its universal elements.

In 2012, for instance, Barack Obama talked about “Treblinka and Auschwitz and Belzec” but he also mentioned Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan, Cote D’Ivoire, Libya and Uganda. He pledged to “realize a future where no African child is stolen from their family and no girl is raped and no boy is turned into a child soldier” and he announced the “first-ever National Intelligence Estimate on the risk of mass atrocities and genocide.” In 2016, he warned that, “anti-Semitism is on the rise,” that “Jews [are] leaving major European cities” and that “Jewish centers are targeted from Mumbai to Overland Park, Kansas.” But he also said honoring the Holocaust’s memory requires people “to make common cause with the outsider, the minority, whether that minority is Christian or Jew, whether it is Hindu or Muslim, or a nonbeliever; whether that minority is native born or immigrant; whether they’re Israeli or Palestinian.”

Just because Obama addressed the Holocaust’s universal lessons in his speeches doesn’t mean he incorporated them into his policies. Talking about what the Holocaust should teach Americans about the carnage in Syria, as Obama did in 2012, is not the same as acting forcefully to try to stop it. But Obama at least acknowledged in concrete ways that the Holocaust creates obligations to protect the dignity of all people, not just Jews.

Trump did not. He said that, “we will never, ever be silent in the face of evil again.” He pledged, “We will stamp out prejudice. We will condemn hatred.” But beyond Jews, he didn’t mention a single specific group threatened by hatred or a single specific place where evil lurks. His references to the Holocaust’s Jewish meaning were lengthy and specific. His references to its universal meaning were brief and vague to the point of meaninglessness.

This isn’t really a surprise. Yes, Trump launched missile strikes to punish Bashar Assad’s government for using chemical weapons, something the Obama administration did not do. But more than any president in modern history, he has been indifferent to—if not contemptuous of—the notion that America has universal obligations that transcend national self-interest. In fact, Trump often suggests that the United States has shown too much moral concern for those beyond its shores. Elie Wiesel famously told Americans that the Holocaust’s message was “don’t be indifferent.” Trump’s message has been: “Don’t be suckers. Take care of your own.”

Obviously, Trump is not the first American president to support dictators. But in his fawning praise of murderous autocrats like Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he has dispensed with even the veneer of moral concern. When the State Department issued its annual human rights report, his secretary of state broke with tradition and declined to attend. Refusing sanctuary to Syrian refugees fleeing that country’s brutal civil war is among Trump’s defining political passions.

And, of course, Trump isn’t only actively indifferent to people in far-off lands who suffer from “prejudice” and “hatred.” From his statement that “Islam hates us” to his false accusation that American Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks, to claiming that Mexican immigrants are “rapists” to his creation of an office devoted to publicizing the crimes of undocumented immigrants, he stokes that prejudice and hatred in the United States.

So it’s no wonder Trump downplayed the Holocaust’s universal lessons. Instead, by talking almost exclusively about its meaning for Jews, he turned the occasion into an exercise in ethnic politics. The Irish get St. Patrick’s Day; the Jews get a speech about the Holocaust.

No one told Trump that until he goes before a group of American Muslims, or a group of Latinos, and vows to protect their rights and dignity, his words to Jews are empty.

In his speech, Trump spoke warmly about Elie Wiesel. On April 22, 1993, the day the Memorial Museum was dedicated, Wiesel turned to Bill Clinton, with whom he shared the dais, and reprimanded him for not taking the Holocaust’s universal message seriously enough. “Mr. President,” he exclaimed, “I cannot not tell you something. I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since for what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that. We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country.”

Sadly, there was no American Jewish figure able or willing to play that prophetic role at Trump’s speech. No one told him that if you deny refuge to the desperate, and slander vulnerable minorities for political gain, you have learned nothing from the Holocaust. No one told Trump that until he goes before a group of American Muslims, or a group of Latinos, and vows to protect their rights and dignity, his words to Jews are empty.

“It is our duty to remember the Shoah and to teach it our children,” wrote Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf. “Not to give us Jews special rights or special roles, but to make us sensitive to the outrages that marred all of Western history and to the tasks of human rescue and succor that still remain.”

By that standard, the people who invited Donald Trump to speak at the Holocaust Memorial Museum—and the people who politely applauded his words—failed.

Most Popular

Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”